A Path to Healing: When Does the Hurt End?Author: Katharina Moonchild Posted: February 12th. 2012 Times Viewed: 2,686

I want to say, the person who inspired me to write this article was Priscilla Hyssop Winters. Her courage to say what she said in her article My Toxic Temper: Clashing With The Craft inspired me to finally have the courage to say what I had to say. I couldn't message her, to tell her what I felt, because I wasn't a teen writer. I was hoping to get what I had to say across to not only her, but to anyone who might have been in this position before.

In all honesty, I have been afraid to admit I am imperfect. I get unreasonably angry with myself, at my child, at those around me who genuinely love me and care for me. I get afraid. I take that anger out on the wrong people, people who don't deserve it. I get impatient. I am ashamed. I feel shame for my actions. How can I look at people and tell them I really wish to be a healer, and if they knew the truth about me, how could they take me seriously? If these people knew the amount of hurt I'd caused, they'd be disgusted. I was disgusted with myself, for a long time. I cried an ocean of tears over what I had done, and continue to do.

But I have been forgiven for the horrendous mistakes I had made as a naive teenager. When people love you unconditionally, they tend to do that. "What you did was messed up. I'm really pissed. But I love you anyway."

It wasn't that long ago, a week or two, the first week of January, that I was so depressed I wanted to give up. When would this pain stop? When would my past mistakes stop haunting me? It had been almost ten years by now. Ten. I'm not even 30 yet, and isn't enough enough? Were those mistakes borne out of ignorance to haunt me the rest of my life? Why did this happen to me, why did I do that, when will this agony just end already?

I was too proud to cry. I had too much to do. But rather than deal with it, I lounged around wasting my time. I was lethargic when I visited my son, whose father has custody. I was angry the second day of the visit, had little patience for his unusually long temper tantrums that day. My motivation was dry and gone, my will and drive had vanished down the toilet. I was facing a mountain of work and I wasn't lifting any fingers to do a single thing about it. At the time of writing this article, this was only last week.

Yet here I am, writing away on how my life was drastically changed. How does it happen, in such a short time?

Well for one, I met an amazing healer. Through the kindness of a local shop owner, she arranged for me to meet him. I'll forever be grateful to her, and she did more for me at that time than she knows. The healer too, of course, he has my immense gratitude. But it wasn't the healing he did that made the profound difference.

To be perfectly honest, it was the fact he understood every single word I said to him. The depth of my despair was as brightly colored and sharp to him as it was to me.

He told me something significant, something that changed the outlook of my suffering and pain forever.

He told me, the pain he went through, the immense pain he suffered 33 years prior to meeting me was so he could sit there in the here and now and understand me and everything I went through. How else could he help me if he didn't know how it felt?

Pain has a funny little quirk about it that makes it so essential to our lives. It teaches us crucial lessons that we otherwise wouldn't learn without it. How would we know fire burns unless we stuck our hand in it? The other funny part about it is it ebbs and flows, fades in and out of our lives. It's never permanent. But little times are we told that; it makes the days, months, and years that drag out seem endless. But there's always a light at the end of that tunnel.

And how do we work through the pain?

Exactly that; we work through it. We face it, we deal with it, and we nurture our own needs. Anger and pain are our bodies'/minds'/soul's way of telling us something is wrong. So what is it that is wrong in our lives? We let those things pile up, our problems, our burdens, our guilt… and when we try to face it all at once it seems impossible. We don't realize we don't have to do it all at once. We don't have to do it fast. We can take our time, do it slow, but work on it a piece at a time like a painting we love and cherish. And really, we are painting ourselves into something that is just an expansion of what already existed.

Often times, I think as Wiccans/Witches/Pagans, what-have-you, we try to hold ourselves to a higher (and what seems almost impossible at times) standard. We're above the common feelings of anger, depression, sadness, rage, jealousy, etc. We belong to love, light, and the Goddess/God.

But we forget, above all, we're human. Wicca, after all, is supposed to be the craft of the wise. And there is a saying that the greatest teacher is pain. Chaos is an essential part of life, an essential part of magic, and it precedes order. These are our hard truths. The most important thing is to not get lost in those things that cause us suffering, but to recognize the lessons within them. Our lessons, our suffering, creates us, shapes and defines us, for the better or worse depending on our choices and outlooks.

To light, there is dark, and from dark, there is light. To find the dawn we first have to travel through the night; but we mustn’t forget that our Goddess and God light the way, help alleviate the burdens of our soul, and will always and forever love and forgive us no matter what wrongs we do, what wrongs are done to us. They are our Parents, after all, and unconditional love was part of the healing all along. And what our Parents want for us the most is our happiness.

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